Transparency – A Great Leadership Quality

I’ve always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy’s latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.

Learn from My Mistakes

Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you’re at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here’s a quick run-down of the topics we’ll cover in my pre-con:

Earning the respect of your team

A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals

Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:

Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines

Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions

Promoting communication within the team and with management

Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope

Dealing with difficult team members

Practicing good team time management techniques

Read all about the goals of the session here. If you’re coming to my session, I’d love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you’re facing!

Personal Experience, Personnel Experience

Also, just a word about my bona fides. I’ve had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable.

On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor’s degree in the school of management back in the 1980′s. I’ve also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership‘s leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin’s not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990′s. In the late 1990′s, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000′s, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.

A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8

The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn’t very flattering, but here’s a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft: